Say thanks with a Tweet

Say thanks with a Subscription

Suggested for this Experiment

Displacer deformer

For this Experiment 3 we’re going to jump out of MoGraph and into the Deformer category, starting with the Displacer deformer. I was introduced to this deformer last week via this tutorial on Greyscale Gorilla by Jon Corriveau, where Jon uses the Displacer deformer to modify a spline. Some strengths of this deformer include the use of textures (Shading) to control the style of displacement, plus Falloff for control over the placement and animation of the deformation.

Originally I was going to create something with splines but ended up roughing out a model of an apple core and using a Subdivision Surface (HyperNurbs) along with the Displacer to add the detail and an FFD deformer to make the shape less uniform. It’s no way near perfect and definitely needs work, but it was fun to build and the displacer made it easier.

So for Assignment 3, take at least 30 minutes and see what you can create using the Displacer deformer. When you’re done, save a JPG and post it in the comments. Remember to include a screenshot of your object hierarchy with the image, it’s helping everyone learn from these experiments.

Like This Article? Tell Your Friends

Keep Up To Date With Our Newsletter

Hey John, I made this in Blender. I don’t have Cinema 4D – not in the budget for now. Nothing on my plate today and I was inspired by your apple. Plus I miss partaking in your experiments. Anyway, sorry for breaking the rules. I wanted to emulate yours but didn’t want to start with a sphere – so I extruded a single vertices into a shape, selected a vertex group and applied the displace modifier to it with a wood texture and tweedled the brightness, contrast and direction – got this kind of chromium candle thing.

Honestly, I am impressed you can do anything in Blender. I opened it once, was disoriented by the camera, uninstalled it promptly. I probably should have tried a bit hard, and experience now tells me that the default camera has a long focal length which I am sure can be changed. But good on you.

I really love this. Its simple but has loads of fun in it. What do you mean by layered noise? You can stack them? Also, what’s that black and white material doing on there? Is that being used for feathering the edges or something?

Very kind of you, helps a lot with learning 🙂 Although I am still quite lost hahaha… lots of knobs to tweak. But I can at least follow along turning things on and off to see how they affect the final result and perhaps I can tell how to do it.

Anyone want some ice cream?
Displacer deformer worked great for the waffle-cone ridges and ice-cream “wrinkles”.
This is an excellent solution for quick modeling/texturing, is a lot quicker than sub-polygon displacement, and adds geometry deformations right there in the viewport!

Great tool for introducing chaos quickly.
Some formula spline sweep nurbs with shaping/taper and the displacer deformer applied to the splines themselves rather than geometry. Might have to use this technique in an animation too, controlling it using soundeffector and/or Noise turbulence animation would be nice.

Hey Manny,
You need to a shader under the Shader tab of the displacer. You have the options to add custom maps, noise shaders, really anything you want in there. That is how you will get the displacer to work. Remember that Hierarchies are important too. Good luck!